We had "strayed," as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of
conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the
frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by
the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy
upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn
a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be
carried over the border and deprived of what we called "our lives," yet by
mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be
the victims of our adventure--a sacrifice.
It took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his
sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a
personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with the
horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our audacious
intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the
unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place
where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former
worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the
old pagan spell.
At any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds
from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were
within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so
attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another
scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the human.
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